I don’t use voice devices myself.
But without experience myself, I think the technology is far too primitive.
“Wake up words”? Pfft. My family members understand when I’m talking to them, without a wake-up word. Even the two-year old grandkid. The cat, that’s a little iffy.
Today’s systems are all about simple commands, I would want contextually aware conversation. But that is difficult to do reliably, which is why they mostly don’t try. There have been several articles recently about the challenges, especially when we try building a home robot. If we are discussing things in the house, and I say “put it in the dishwasher” and the robot doesn’t understand the contextual referent of “it” and puts the cat in the dishwasher… Contextual understanding is not about parsing, it’s about experience with the world. You can imagine teaching the computer that living things don’t go in the dishwasher. But neither does the zoom lens. But a diamond ring does well in the dishwasher. But the wood handled cutlery that I bring out only for festivities does not. A CD can survive it, a USB stick probably not.
(From this article: What’s wrong with Google’s new robot project :
One particularly vivid example of this comes from the French company Nabla, that explored the utility of GPT-3 as a medical advisor:
Maayan Harel drew this great illustration for Rebooting AI, of a robot being told to put everything in the living room away:
Why am I so fixated on context? Because of the nature of Roon. It understands the music and the musicians.
This is a great bassist.
It’s Stephan Crump, he often plays with Vijay Iyar, has been in Iyer’s trio together with Marcus Gilmore on drums.
Oh, yeah, I remember I bought some albums directly from him, had an interesting conversation.
Yes, those were with Jen Chapin. Added in 2008. Crump has been very active recently, lots of albums in the library, and several new ones we haven’t added but available on Tidal and Qobuz.
Why don’t you bring them in, I’ll listen to them later.
And Crump has some albums on his web site, but that’s for downloading, they cost money.
Ok, we’ll wait until I’ve listened to some more, I’ll decide later.
By the way, remember we had a parallel situation: Crump is married to Chapin, and there was a similar couple, Rebecca Martin composing and singing with her husband on bass, Larry Grenadier.
Of course, Grenadier has done a lot of great work! A solo album, what’s it called?
The Gleaners. One of your favorites. And both of the performed on a Paul Motian album, very unusual, Motian almost never uses vocalists.
Ok, a lot of interesting stuff. Why don’t you put together a play list that browses among those people, I’ll listen to it later. For now, let’s continue with Iger.
That would be a conversational partner I would pay money for.
The Alexa with a camera for the bedroom (supposedly so that it can recommend clothing, a task that would be completely impossible without it) was too much for me 
